Why They Hate Him

Alan Dershowitz is a liberal Democrat law professor who voted for Hillary Clinton. Nevertheless he repeatedly finds himself in the position of having to defend Donald Trump against absurd attacks against the president by Democrats and other progressives who seem to be willing to make any allegation if there's even a remote chance that it'll damage Mr. Trump.

Recently, his political opponents have ludicrously accused him of treason for his rather maladroit performance at the press conference in Helsinki. It seems that the charges against him become more and more strident and bizarre with every passing week.

Dershowitz says that the allegation of treason against Mr. Trump is "completely over the top". It has no constitutional merit whatsoever.

According to a NewsMax article Dershowitz appeared as a guest on Hugh Hewitt's talk radio show and said this:

You might not like what Trump did. I didn’t like what he did. But to call it treason is just wrong as a matter of constitutional law.

What President Trump is alleged to have done, you know, making the image of Putin stronger and helping him gain international credibility around the world doesn’t even come close to treason under the Constitution.

It's another example of shrill Democrats making Trump even stronger with his base.

It shows that the Democrats and the opponents of Trump are not making nuanced, carefully thought through, calibrated criticisms. They’re going completely, completely over the top.

So why are the Democrats throwing the word "treason" around? Here's Dershowitz:

Treason is one of the two crimes specified for impeachment, and that’s why I think so many of the Trump opponents are focusing on treason, because if he did commit treason … then he would be subject to impeachment. But the criteria for treason are laid out clearly in the Constitution, and people shouldn’t just be making up crimes.

Dershowitz concluded with this:

I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. I voted for Hillary Clinton. I’m a liberal Democrat. But I don’t want to see the law stretched to target somebody whose politics we disapprove of.

Here's a question: What accounts for the incredibly vitriolic hatred the left has for Donald Trump? It's true he's undoing many of his predecessor's policies, but I don't think that by itself accounts for the extraordinary animus directed at him. I think there's something deeper.

People on the left, whether in the media or in politics fervently - indeed, religiously - believe two things:

1. They believe that they're more politically astute than the average Trump voter and more intelligent than Trump himself, and
2. They believe that liberal ideas are without question superior to those of conservatives.

In fact many on the left, especially those in the public eye, have invested their lives and their professional reputations in those ideas. They hold them with all the intensity of a true believer. Their hatred for Trump, then, is due not so much to his repudiation of their policies, though that's surely part of it, but far worse, by his success he's showing those ideas to be bankrupt, bankrupt intellectually and practically.

In other words, Trump's success with the economy and, perhaps, in foreign affairs is humiliating to those who have spent their lives promoting the very policies that the president has shown don't work, and they've invested their careers in opposing policies that Mr. Trump has shown do work (tax cuts, for instance).

The president is, in effect, discrediting the progressive's religion. He's demonstrating to the world that that religion is a fraud, and they hate him for it with all their heart. That hatred manifests itself in their frantic attempts to destroy him before it sinks any deeper into the public consciousness that the progressive faith is, at bottom, a hoax.